What is the future for social conservatives in U.S. presidential elections?

[KingSweden]

It depends on how you define "social conservatism," as exclusively religious politics or as supporting a group of ideas that are secular, but support a conservative social policy. The second, I think, is bound to be much more successful in the United States moving forward.

All this gloom and doom about social conservatives (I am certainly not one myself) leaves out that if they were willing to - and they have not shown that willingness, at least as far as I have seen - SoCons could build a coalition designed for the 21st century, provided they were willing to branch out beyond evangelicals and the handful of Catholics who they have an alliance with but still do not particularly like. Immigrants from India who are practicing, devout Hindus are staunchly socially conservative, but vote for Democrats in high numbers because of the nativist, evangelizing strain in the American social conservative movement. This would be the first place to start, in addition to perhaps even reaching out to secular Chinese and Japanese immigrants who are very strict with their children at home but are not initially drawn to religiosity in their politicians. Eventually maybe even Muslims and Latinos, since we keep hearing every year about how Hispanics are Republicans who just don't know it yet (I think progress has been made here in reaching out to Hispanic Evangelicals and conservative Catholics and getting them more involved).

The point I'm trying to make here is that social conservatism does not need to be the same thing as political Christianity. A law-and-order, strong-families (or whatever you want to call it) coalition can be built in a multicultural society. Whether today's social conservatives recognize this or not is the question about how relevant they will be.